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Dwight Macdonald was born in New York City, and was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy and at Yale University. At university, he was editor of The Yale Record, the student humor magazine.[1] As a student at Yale, he also was a member of Psi Upsilon; his first job was as a trainee executive for the Macy's department store company.

In 1929, Macdonald was employed at Time magazine; he had been offered a job by Henry Luce, a fellow alumnus at Yale University. In 1930, he became the associate editor of Fortune, then a new publication created by Luce.[2] Like many writers on Fortune, his politics were radicalized by the Great Depression. He resigned from the magazine in 1936 over an editorial dispute, when the magazine's executives severely edited the last installment of his extended four-part attack on U.S. Steel.

Dwight Macdonald was an editor of the Partisan Review magazine from 1937 to 1943; but, in the course of editorial disagreements, about the degree, the practice, and the principles of political, cultural, and literary criticism, he quit to establish politics, a magazine of more out-spoken and leftist editorial perspective, which he published from 1944 to 1949.[3]

At the same time, Macdonald was critical of the methods that elected, democratic governments used to oppose totalitarianism. In the course of the Second World War (1939–45), his health suffered (increased fatigue and psychological depression) as he observed the progressive horrors of the war, especially the commonplace practices of bombing civilian populations, the destruction of entire cities — especially the fire-bombing of Dresden (February 1945) — and the mistreatment of dehumanized Germans. Hence, by War’s end, Macdonald’s politics had progressed to pacifism and to libertarian socialism.[7][10][11]

In that vein, in 1952, in debating East–West politics with the writer Norman Mailer, Macdonald said that, if forced to choose a political side, he would choose the West — because he opposed Stalinism and Soviet communism as the greatest threats to civilization.[11] In 1953, he publicly re-stated that pro–West political stance in the revised edition of the essay “The Root is Man” (1946); nonetheless, in light of the anti–Communist witch hunts that were McCarthyism (1950–56), Macdonald later repudiated such either-or politics.[12][13] In 1955, Macdonald became the associate editor (for one year) of Encounter magazine, a publication sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which was a CIA-funded front organisation meant to ideologically influence and control cultural élites in the Cold War (1945–91) with the U.S.S.R. Macdonald was ignorant of Encounter magazine being a CIA front, and, when he learned of that, condemned CIA sponsorship of literary publications and organizations; in that time, he also participated in conferences sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom.[7][14]

To make the Bible readable in the modern sense means to flatten out, tone down, and convert into tepid expository prose what in [the King James Version] is wild, full of awe, poetic, and passionate. It means stepping down the voltage of the K.J.V. so that it won’t blow any fuses. Babes and sucklings (or infants) can play with the R.S.V. without the slightest danger of electrocution.[15]

In The New Republic magazine, in the essay “The Browbeater” (23 November 2011), Franklin Foer said that Macdonald was a hatchet-man for high culture. That, in the book Masscult and Midcult: Against The American Grain (2011), a new edition of Against the American Grain: Essays on the Effects of Mass Culture (1962), Macdonald's cultural criticism “culminated in a plea for highbrows to escape from the mass culture” that dominates the mainstream of American society, and that “the highbrows would flee to their own hermetic little world, where they could produce art for one another, while resolutely ignoring the masses”.[16]

Likewise, in the essay “Dwight Macdonald on Culture: The Happy Warrior of the Mind, Reconsidered” (2013), Tadeusz Lewandowski said that Macdonald’s approach to cultural questions, as a public intellectual, placed him in the conservative tradition of the British cultural critic Matthew Arnold, of whom he was the literary heir in the twentieth century. Previously, in the field of Cultural Studies Dwight Macdonald was placed among the radical traditions of the New York Intellectuals (left-wing anti–Stalinists) and of the Marxist Frankfurt School.[17]

In further action upon his political principles, Macdonald signed his name to the “Writers and Editors War-tax Protest”, by which he refused to pay income-tax, in order to undermine the financing of the undeclared U.S. war in Vietnam.[20] Likewise, along with the American public intellectuals Mitchell Goodman, Henry Braun, Denise Levertov, Noam Chomsky, and William Sloane Coffin, Dwight Macdonald signed the anti-war manifesto “A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority” (12 October 1967), and was a member of RESIST, a non-profit organization for co-ordinating grass-roots political work.[21]